Snow, Birds, and Beer

It snowed at Riverwood today. You can see it in both pictures but particularly the one of the shed.

Some of you were around last year when I posted many photos of chickadees. They landed on us, fed from our hands, and there is even a pictures of one on my head in my January Archives.

It won't be the same this year. Whereas there were more than a dozen chickadees eating voraciously last winter, there are six at the most this year, and usually fewer. Also, we have seed and suet hanging from the tree as well as the peanut butter that we add. So with more food available, they are not inclined to land on us.

Our main task for the day was to do our in laws a favour by taking many, many cartons of beer bottles back for refund. They often don't have much time while they are here, and the bottles have accumulated over the past few years.

We have government-run beer stores in this province. That's what they call the oulets— The Beer Store. It used to be Brewer's Retail, but everybody called it the Beer Store, so they changed the name to suit. The problem is that there is no Beer Store nearby, but the LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario) sells it locally.

So, we took a whole carload into the village which is about 15 miles distant. When we got to the LCBO, we noticed the sign that said that bottles could be returned at the gas station — on Friday and Saturday only, between the hours of 11:00 am and 3:00 pm! Can you credit such nonsense? The lady at the gas station said that we could get rid of our load by donating the bottles to the medical centre which is fund raising, but when Cuppa inquired there, they didn't know anything about it.

The next step was to check with the guy at the general store about two miles form here. He said that we could take them to another gas station in another village in the opposite direction. When we got there, the truck was just loading empties, and we were able to unload our cargo.

We walked out of there with sixty dollars! That's how many bottles were lying around here — and we weren't even able to fit them all in the car today. We probably have ten dollars more to come. Guess what we're doing with the money?